Secure by design: Introducing Postman Spec Hub and BYOK encryption
The demand for “better APIs, faster” has reached a fever pitch in engineering offices around the globe since the sharp rise in AI agents and other GenAI technologies last year. Postman’s co-founder and CEO Abhinav Asthana recently shared his view on why APIs are now foundational to modern software development—and, by extension, to modern enterprise IT infrastructure and security.
Meeting this growing demand—and elevated quality standards—for APIs can be challenging. The underlying architecture supporting API development is often a patchwork of point solutions implemented by a rotating door of leaders over the course of years, each of them attempting to address a niche gap in their team’s process and tooling. The resulting fragmentation of tools across teams makes it virtually impossible to implement API design and governance measures at scale. And the cost of maintaining the status quo—i.e., poor API design and limited governance—is significant:
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Systemic inefficiencies in the architecture underpinning API development processes limit deployment frequency, slowing innovation and API delivery.
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Poor API design results in downstream failures, making it difficult to reduce change failure rates and ensure stability.
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Developer experience is hindered by constant context-switching across an expanding ecosystem of tools.
These challenges are then compounded by the fact that developers often view API design as having to do more work so they can do their real work (which, of course, is building features, shipping code, and delivering value).
Additionally, this approach of adding point solutions like Stoplight or SwaggerHub for API design and governance isn’t a sustainable long-term strategy for two primary reasons:
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Adopting yet another system disrupts developers’ established (and often preferred) workflows, impeding internal compliance with new processes;
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Every new tool introduces additional access points that increase the risk of data breaches.
According to research conducted by the Ponemon Institute in the 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report, data breaches can cost industries up to $9.7 million USD per incident—with the average cost of a single data breach going up 10% from 2023. The security risk incurred by an organization now outweighs any short-term engineering benefits promised by a new tool. As a result, technology leaders face increasing challenges to implementing API governance—despite this being an essential foundation for scaling API development and long-term GenAI readiness.
Enter Postman. Postman’s vision for the future of API development is one fluid workflow that allows developers to seamlessly move from design to deployment—on top of a single, secure platform your organization can trust.
Today, we are excited to turn this vision into a reality for your organization with the release of two new features—Postman Spec Hub and BYOK encryption.
Postman’s Spec Hub elevates API design quality with intuitive tools for authoring, governing, and publishing API specifications across multiple formats—now seamlessly unifying the entire API development lifecycle on a single platform. With the addition of Spec Hub, development teams can now fluidly transition between design, documentation, testing, mocking, and monitoring within a connected, end-to-end workflow on the Postman platform they already trust and love.
And Postman’s BYOK encryption empowers you to realize the benefits of streamlined API development on Postman with confidence—providing encryption keys that give your security team full ownership of sensitive API data in the Postman Cloud.
Let’s get into how you can now transform how you securely scale best-in-class API innovation—from design to deploy—on Postman.
Syncing for speed: Why Spec Hub is a force-multiplier
Developers are under pressure to move faster—yet they’re slowed down by disjointed tools, duplicated effort, and governance policies that weren’t built for real-world workflows. Development velocity suffers when engineers have to jump between systems just to stay compliant, and when governance enforcement happens late in the cycle, it often results in costly rework.
Postman’s Spec Hub brings API design directly into the developer’s workflow, enabling them to design, test, and build APIs in a single pane of glass with no context switching. So not only are developers able to build better APIs, faster, engineering leaders are able to maintain stricter API governance measures across their teams with no pushback or friction.
With Postman Spec Hub, both devs and engineering leaders benefit:
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One-click workflows for devs, tool consolidation for leaders.
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Postman Spec Hub unlocks one-click workflows that allow developers to design, test, mock, and build without ever leaving Postman
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And this one-click workflow allows engineering & security leaders to confidently consolidate all API development onto one tool for higher developer productivity, lower TCO, and greater enterprise security
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Fewer errors to resolve for devs, consistently higher API quality for leaders.
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Spec Hub features built-in linting to catch errors—supporting large spec files that would otherwise require tedious and time-consuming developer reviews
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Spec Hub’s out-of-the-box linting engine also helps enforce org-wide API standards as a default, allowing engineering leaders to raise the bar on API quality standards across the business
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User-friendly specification editor for devs, faster onboarding across skill levels for leaders.
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Postman Spec Hub offers a user-friendly, visual schema editor—with autocomplete and a functional outline—as well as traditional direct code editing (in JSON/YAML) so developers can navigate API design however they prefer
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Spec Hub’s editor makes API design simple for all 35 million developers on Postman, ensuring engineering leaders can maintain both onboarding speed and development efficiency standards across every developer, regardless of skill level
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Ultimately, Postman’s Spec Hub eliminates leadership trade-offs between key priorities—namely, developer velocity, API governance, and cost efficiency—while giving developers the freedom to move fast and ship more.
A cloud you can trust: Enterprise-grade encryption with Postman BYOK
A single data breach can erase years of gains in developer productivity—which is why IT and security leaders are driving initiatives that ruthlessly consolidate engineering work onto a few select platforms—choosing ones that give them both the velocity to scale and the confidence to stay secure.
But not all options are built for the API era. Some teams rely on tools that weren’t designed for building APIs in the first place. Others remain stuck with on-prem solutions that can’t keep pace with developer needs. And while some modern cloud tools offer speed, they often force a tradeoff in control and compliance.
At Postman, we are honoring the trust that nearly 500,000 organizations—including 98% of the Fortune 500—have placed in our platform by putting data control on the Postman Cloud exactly where it belongs: in our customers’ hands with Postman BYOK.
As the name suggests, Postman’s Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) encryption allows enterprises to fully control and manage their encryption keys for full ownership of sensitive API data that not even the Postman Cloud can access. Additionally, every encryption event is logged for compliance oversight, making audits painless with complete audit trails readily available should you need them.
And of course, we continue to uphold the highest security and compliance standards for our own platform, with GDPR and US state privacy law compliance, SOC2, and other regulatory certifications that ensure we safeguard your data with industry-leading practices at every level of our infrastructure.
Start shipping better APIs, faster—today.
Whether you’re driving improvements on core DORA metrics, optimizing for developer experience, or laser-focused on securing your enterprise IT architecture, Postman’s all-in-one API platform with Spec Hub and BYOK encryption delivers the comprehensive solution modern enterprises need.
Want to learn more? Visit the “Secure by Design” page to learn more about these features, or head to the Spec Hub product page to dive deep into how Spec Hub can revolutionize API design and governance at scale. Also, join us on May 8 for a webinar on scaling API governance without slowing down your developers. Learn how to eliminate tool sprawl, enforce standards effortlessly, and speed up development with Postman Spec Hub. Save your spot today!
Last but not least, please leave any feedback or questions in the comments! Our product team is eager to hear from you.
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